[This book review appeared in the Mar/Apr 1995 issue
of Conservative Review, pp. 35-7.]

Book Review

Dictatorship
of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future

By Richard
Bernstein

Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

367 pages, $25,00, hardback

The
Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

By Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr.

W. W. Norton & Company, 1992

160 pages, $14.95, hardback

Reviewed by Dwight D. Murphey

In
American universities today, an intensely human struggle is being waged that is
not at all unlike that which occurred in the universities of Weimar Germany in
the early 1930s. The apostles of an alternative worldview, imbued with all the
force of a self-righteous morality and angry fanaticism, insist that their view
be imposed on all; and for this purpose they seek to impose a totalitarian-like
consensus through a ubiquitous pattern of intolerance and control: the
rewriting of textbooks, the restructuring of courses, the reeducation of those
who act contrary to their dictates, and the ostracism of anyone who disagrees.

In
Weimar Germany it was the Nazis and the Communists who sought totalitarian
dominance.In the United States today,
it is the alienated Left.I almost wrote
“the proponents of multiculturalism,” but that is too limited and loses
historical perspective.The Left in the
United States has on three occasions shown its totalitarian propensity: in the
early 1930s when many of its intellectuals saw their way clear, under cover of
the Depression, openly to embrace Communism; in the late 1960s when radicals
like Herbert Marcuse called for the suppression of an open marketplace of ideas
on the ground that such freedom is in fact a form of “repressive tolerance”;
and today when radical multiculturalists rule our intellectual elite with a
combination of intense hostility and a myth of victimization.It is a mistake to see these three episodes
as entirely separate; each has fed the next, and together they serve as windows
into the very soul of the Left.

In each
of the conflicts between an open society and a totalitarian movement going back
as far as the French Revolution, there have been many stalwart individuals who
have stood up courageously for an open society.Included among these have been the countless “conservatives” or
“classical liberals” who have defended the main corpus of the society against
the totalitarian assaults.Within the
intellectual culture that has served as the source of the totalitarian impulse,
however, such people have been though irrelevant—and treated as almost
invisible—precisely because they support the mainstream culture that the
movement so profoundly hates.

Much
more effective—because it is more difficult to consign them to irrele- vancy—have been those who
have shared in the animus against the mainstream but have come finally to see
the horrors of the totalitarian impulse.It is those who champion the open society after having “heard the
screams,” as Whittaker Chambers once did while visiting Moscow, who for the
most part make the most effective opponents of totalitarianism.They are such people as John Dos Passos, J. B. Matthews, William Henry Chamberlin, EliseoVivas, Eugene Lyons, Max
Eastman, James Burnham, Freda Utley, Frank Meyer, Willmoore
Kendall, Whittaker Chambers, Irving Kristol, William
S. Schlamm, Will Herberg,
Louis Fischer, Philip Abbott Luce, and many others.

Somewhat
distinguishable from these are the thinkers on the Left who have repudiated
totalitarianism while believing in both social democracy and an open society.In this genre, Richard Bernstein, author of
the first of the books being reviewed, cites “such giants as Irving Howe,
Sidney Hook, George Orwell, and others.”

Both of
the books being reviewed are by authors who belong to this latter
category.Bernstein and Schlesinger each
take pains to make it clear that they are not conservatives.Therein lies both the great strength of each
book and its fundamental insufficiency.Bernstein’s and Schlesinger’s are among the more eloquent voices against
the suffocating atmosphere of today’s multiculturalism.Within universities where what a conservative
says is totally ignored, their voices will potentially be the most effective
among the great majority of faculty, many of whom find the totalitarian impulse
abhorrent but would never be willing to appear conservative.

The
insufficiency—which is itself of vital importance—is that each author’s social
democratic proclivities lead him to believe that the problem lies entirely in
the excesses of those who would take multiculturalism too far and not in the
fact of vast immigration.If the ideas
were more moderate, they say, America could hold to an assimilationist model,
bringing the new millions into a common culture of liberal democracy that would
“shed ancient prejudices.”

This
deserves serious consideration because it involves a fundamental and very
dangerous error.It is true that most of
the immigrants themselves come to this country wanting to share in the freedom
we enjoy and the fruits that can be reaped from effort within it.This would point toward assimilation.But two truths fly in the face of it: First,
historical experience provides virtually no example of a society that has successfully
brought widely disparate together into a harmonious composite.Rather than “sweetness and light,” the
probability is far greater that there will be intense divisions and
animosities, with all the incurable horrors that those can entail.Second, it is important to note that the
apostles of American balkanization would have no chance to carry out their
hate-the-West agenda in the absence of vast immigration.That immigration is a sine qua non of their politics and ideology, since they count on it
as the soil in which their alienation can flourish.Bernstein and Schlesinger are foolish to
suppose that the radical Left will somehow evaporate and will no longer contend
for dominance among the Third World masses that they are willing to see
continue to come to this country.At
best, what they propose is a desperate gamble, with America’s future at stake.

Before
I conclude this review, though, let me point once again to the positive
contribution that each book makes.I
have said that each author is eloquent in his opposition to multiculturalist
ideology.We need a more concrete grasp
of each book’s merits than I have so far conveyed.

Schlesinger,
for example, is splendid when he observes that a nation lives by the myths its
people share, and accordingly opposes the attack that is being made on all
American icons.Along the same lines, he
sees that a common language is essential, and so opposes the bilingualism that
fosters separatism. And here is his summary of multiculturalist ideology: “The
cult of ethnicity exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and
antagonisms, drives ever deeper the awful wedges between races and
nationalities.The endgame is self-pity
and self-ghettoization.”

Bernstein,
a reporter for the New York Times who
spent several years with Time
magazine, is often equally insightful, but his book has an additional merit in
that it gives factual detail about many of the specifics of the
multiculturalist excesses.Without those
specifics, the ideology is able to hide behind its protestations that “all we
want is more diversity and tolerance.”The specifics show that these protestations are a camouflage, and that
what really lies behind the movement is a thrust for power, combined with a
thorough-going hatred for mainstream American life and for the West in general.

Among
the many specifics told by Bernstein is the story of the recent fight at the
University of Texas.There, Professor
Alan Gribben, a specialist in Mark Twain, became the
hero (or, as the Left prefers, the villain) of a bitter struggle over whether
the 40% of freshmen students who had not tested out of freshman composition
should be subjected to a course that, losing sight of all interest in teaching
composition, was to have been a blatant indoctrination in anti-Western
multiculturalism.Gribben
had already made himself the subject of ostracism, meager pay raises, and hate
mail because a couple of years earlier he had cast the lone vote against a
proposed master’s program in “ethnic and Third World literatures.”

The
proposal for the course called for having the students read the civil rights
decisions of the United States Supreme Court, supplemented by a single book,
Paula Rothenberg’s Racism and Sexism: An
Integrated Study.Rothenberg herself
wrote that “one assumption of this book is that racism and sexism pervade
American culture.”It would seem natural
enough, in any normal academic setting, that members of the faculty would
suggest, as a bare minimum, opening the course to a variety of subjects, not
just this one, and would also suggest that at least one additional supplemental
readings book be used to present a contrasting viewpoint.But when Professor Gribben
and others made these obvious suggestions, they were treated as virtual
fascists for doing so.A philosophy
professor, in an article, wrote of “the reactionary right” and “a
well-orchestrated right-wing offensive.”To Gribben, this must have seemed awfully
strange, since he had been, according to Bernstein, “a campus leftist during
his graduate-student days at Berkeley.”It doesn’t take much dissent to be a pariah by the intolerant Left.Things eventually became so bad for Gribben that he left his beloved University of Texas and
took a faculty position in Alabama.

Bernstein’s
telling of such events gives flesh-and-bone to what otherwise might seem an
abstraction.We need to know just what
the totalitarianism involves, in human terms.Some hope springs from an account like the one about the University of
Texas, since it shows us that, amid all of the intolerance and excess, there
are scholars who, even though they may at one time themselves have made common
cause with the radical Left, are willing to stand up for the values that best
typify a university and an open society.